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Microsoft BPOS Hit by Another Outage

Microsoft's cloud-based Exchange messaging service once again went down on Wednesday across North America, but the company says service has been restored.

The company's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) experienced several outages during mid-May. This latest outage appears to have only lasted a few hours. The company attributed the problem to errors with the network and said it has replaced defective hardware.

According to user complaints, some people were having trouble sending messages, while others were unable to use the Service Health Dashboard.

"Service for the Service Health Dashboard has been restored, and customers are reporting the ability to access all services," the company said on a Microsoft Online Services support forum tracking the incident. "Thank you for your patience during this morning's incident. We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business, and we apologize for any inconvenience this incident caused."

Some customers were fuming on the message board, however, questioning their decision to use the cloud-based messaging service.

The outage comes less than one week before Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is set to launch Office 365, the successor to BPOS.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.